Peter Keough

Visitors is lovely, soothing, like the cinematic equivalent of tasteful elevator music, but it doesn’t convey as much truth as a single glimpse into Triska’s eyes.

Enigmatic, atmospheric, and seductive, the film unfortunately sheds little light on subjects that have too long been hidden in the dark.

More spectacular special effects might have helped, or at least something more creative than a spaceship that resembles a giant Christmas tree ornament shaped like a corkscrew. Perhaps as a well-written play for a cast of three, Passengers might have been first class. Instead, it’s just another mediocre thrill ride.

The film works adequately as a historical drama.

John Landis’s “Animal House” (1978) this is not.

What they don’t quite make clear, and perhaps it is impossible to do so, is what really happened in this odd episode of international espionage epitomizing movie-mogul tyranny.

It’s a mordant if unwieldy thriller examining how evil not only becomes the norm, but a virtue.

It consists of a series of episodic encounters, misadventures, and musings redeemed in part by the presence of two scenic wonders, the unspoiled 2,190-mile grandeur of the Appalachian Trail and the spectacular crapulousness of Nick Nolte.

Unfortunately, the material flounders from the broadly farcical to the bombastically melodramatic. Race and ethnicity aren’t so much the problem as gender is. Despite Gainsbourg’s efforts, her character becomes a caricature.

When the two veteran actors team up in Vermont writer-director Jay Craven’s wry, uneven Northern Borders, adapted from Howard Frank Mosher’s novel, they mesh so well they almost hold the rest of the movie together. But their nuanced performances underscore the weakness of the rest of the cast, and Craven’s erratic tonal shifts from the whimsical to the sentimental trip up the episodic plot.

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton starts out strong, peaks quickly, and then gets tangled in complications and compromise and falls apart.

After Lake Bell’s smart, unconventional debut, “In a World. . .” (2013), her new film, I Do . . . Until I Don’t (she apparently likes ellipses in her titles), is disappointingly ordinary.

The sardonic laughs include title cards with the name of each character who has joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Because of the film’s earnest awkwardness, these excursions into the demimonde come off as campy.

Ronit’s ebullient spirit spreads vivacity, discontent, and resentment. She offers the possibility of choice — between secular independence or religious tradition. But Lelio opts for an insipid neutrality that does a disservice to both.

At its best the film evokes the palpable terror of a city where uniformed thugs could arrest or kill anyone at any time with impunity.

Perhaps Poe’s tone poses a problem; the edge-of-hysteria voice does not hold up well over the course of a feature-length film.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

With Too Late, Hauck confirms that he’s a master of the film medium. What’s less convincing is why this film matters.

In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

For the next two decades, the end notes reveal, Baker made the best music of his career. The film does its job if it encourages people to give that music a listen.

As a suspenseful true crime story, 24 Days succeeds. As a warning against the ever present dangers of anti-Semitism, it is eloquent and disturbing. It’s in combining the two that Arcady mishandles the case.